Tom Hanks Ad-Libbed The Best Line In ‘Forrest Gump’ And 11 Other Things You May Not Know About The Movie

Tom Hanks has had an incredibly fruitful acting career, moving seamlessly from comedies to dramas in some of the most beloved and successful movies of the last 25 years. Forrest Gump might just be his most popular film and is celebrating its 20th anniversary. The movie about a slow-witted man who finds himself being pulled into every major United States event of the 1960s and 70s was the number one film at the box office in the summer of 1994 for a 10-week run — and in theaters for 42 weeks total. It went on to pull $677.4 million worldwide, give Tom Hanks his second Oscar statue, and — let’s never forget — it spawned a chain of overpriced seafood restaurants.

None of this should be surprising though, people love Tom Hanks. (Dare I say even more than Bill Murray?) So Tom Hanks in a white suit recounting all of America’s civil rights and Vietnam strife through the child-like eyes of a mentally challenged man was nothing short of a giant in American cinema. As much as people love Tom Hanks and as big as Forrest Gump was, it’s generated its share of criticism in pop culture. Some people feel that Pulp Fiction was a more deserving movie of the Best Picture Oscar that year, and others take issue with the notion we’re expected to believe a man of Forrest Gump’s IQ could possibly achieve as much as he does. (I generally believe it as much as I believe Bruce Wayne could pull off being Batman.)

We’ll save the discussion for whether the movie is a box of chocolates or three hours of eye-rolling melodramatic moments in the comments. First, let’s find out what happened to that bench Forrest had himself planted on for so long.

1. The bench Tom Hanks sat on sold at auction. The bench that Forrest sat on with his box of chocolates at the Savannah bus stop sold in 2013 for a whopping $25,000. There was also no bench at that particular bus stop in Savannah, producers had to bring it in for the shoot.

Paramount Pictures

2. There were several potential Bubbas before actor Mykelti Williamson got the part. Williamson was up against a fresh-faced Dave Chappelle and Ice Cube for the part of Forrest’s shrimp-loving friend. Cube reportedly turned the part down because he didn’t want to portray a “dumb” character.

Paramount Pictures

3. Bubba needed some enhancements for his lip. Mykelti Williamson wore a prosthetic piece in his mouth to help extend his lower lip. Bubba’s lip was so prominent that it actually made it difficult for Williamson to work after the movie, because as he described “casting directors thought Zemeckis had discovered some weird-looking guy and put him in front of the camera.”

4. Hanks’ Forrest Gump was more passive than author Winston Groom’s character. Groom’s Gump was a bit more aware of the world around him and less passive, admitting in the opening paragraph that people treat him poorly because he’s “an idiot.” The Gump from the book is also described as a more heavyset man, and Groom has said that he would have picked John Goodman for the role. Oh, and in the book Forrest accomplishes even more of the impossible by becoming an astronaut.

Universal Pictures

5. The book was fairly unknown before the film. Winston Groom’s novel came out in 1986 and sold around 30,000 copies, before the movie catapulted it to the top of the charts. Less than a year after the movie was released the book had sold 1.4 million copies and later spawned the 1995 sequel, Gump and Co. The first page of the sequel even jokingly jabs at the movie with Gump saying, “Don’t never let nobody make a movie of your life’s story.”

Pocket Books

6. Tom Hanks ad libbed one of the movies most iconic lines. “My name is Forrest Gump. People call me Forrest Gump,” was supposedly thought up on the spot by Hanks.

“Tom Hanks, slow yes, retarded,maybe, he had braces on his legs, but he won a ping-pong competition and charmed the pants of Nixon? That aint retarded, he was godamn war hero! Do you know any retarded war heroes?”

This movie is such an unbelievable sack of shit. From the doltish catchphrases it spawned, to the wooden acting, to the Newt Gingrich version of 1960s history where independent women justly get AIDS while antiwar radicals and civil rights activists are all shallow assholes, it’s just one giant turd after another.

I should head off the pass here and say that Otto Man’s dead on about “Gump”‘s popularity with the right circa-’94/’95. Clinton even complains about the movie in his autobiography. Gingrich and Co. thought the film’s popularity was a pretext for the arrival of a more conservative Congress come the midterms. This has always seemed a very fraught argument to make to me. What’s the implication here? It takes a retard to see the right vision of America?

Amen. I hated this movie then, and I hate it now. I remember getting into heated arguments about it, especially after Shawshank and Pulp Fiction came out. I didn’t argue that it was the third best movie of the year; I argued that it might possibly have been the absolute worst movie of the year. I lost friends over this argument, and I regret nothing.

I loved this movie when it came out. Saw it twice. Very bittersweet and sentimental.

I watched this movie about two months ago, and I guess twenty years of experience has led me to the conclusion that Jenny is on par with Darth Vader, Hannibal Lecter and Jaws. What this woman did to Forrest all throughout his life was absolutely unforgivable. I HATE HATE HATE her character. Yeah, I understand her father was god awful and it set her on a bad path, but for god’s sake, why would she manipulate and emotionally abuse a mentally-challenged man his entire life? Forrest should have taken a dump on her grave at the end of the movie. That should be the first shot of the sequel if they ever get around to making it.

@DarthBile It was made in Hollywood by the people that believe that its reasonable to assume wacky hi jinks will solve all romantic problems, people can slowly walk away from explosions without having their organs turned to liquid shit and that shooting an unarmed villain in the head will result in no consequences what so ever because he was bad. Do you really not expect them to assume all bad behavior could be excused by a shitty childhood?

I don’t think I’d put Jenny in the same category as any of those characters. I think her upbringing made her view love from a distance. Forrest, on the other hand, was on the very end of the other spectrum, he had so much love given to him, he just wasn’t able to fully understand it. Same goes for Jenny. She went on a bad path and connected with Forrest from the beginning as an outcast of sorts. He kept pursuing her because he didn’t know any better, he believed that’s what he should do. She always had a soft spot for Forrest since they first met, but I don’t think she thought of him as more than a friend. They both saw the world differently and she wasn’t in any position to be as nurturing as Forrest’s mother was. Well, that was my take away of it.

I like to imagine a gender-reversed version of this relationship. Old Jimbo banging the simple girl who can run like the wind. To paraphrase noted philosopher Dave Attell, “your friends say she’s retarded, but them titties ain’t retarded!”

@Alice Was Pushed: You can use that logic with Hannibal Lecter too. The only thing you can reasonably do in a movie is judge a character by their actions…and I am coming at this perspective from Forrest being a challenged individual: she let Forrest feel her up when she didn’t have feelings for him, she irrationally ditched him in the process, reconnects with him in DC (assuming she never received any of those letters he sent to her) only to break his heart and go back with the hippy/Black Panther wanna-be, comes back when she was out on her ass, sponges off of him playing with his emotions a third time, bangs him, leaves him with no explanation again, contacts him a few years later to let him know that 1) he’s a father (which he robbed Forrest of helping bring up the kid and the kid of getting to know his father) and 2) she had AIDS which meant that not only would he take care of her until she died but would have to raise their kid alone in the process.

And if you are given the ability to look into Jenny’s character and make these pronouncements, can you say with any certainty that IF she didn’t get struck with the AIDS virus, would she had ever let Forrest know that he was the father of their kid?

@DarthBile I get what you’re saying. Regarding the letters, I doubt she got all of them. A bunch were returned to Forrest with ‘Return to Sender’ posted on them. She didn’t have just one address, she was always on the go. She definitely wasn’t in the right for her actions towards Forrest, but as I said before, they were both at different ends of the spectrum when it came to life and love. Forrest wasn’t supposed to amount to much, but he did. Meanwhile, Jenny’s loss of innocence and any semblance of a childhood left her broken. She never felt worthy of love. I think she felt safe with Forrest most of all. I can’t say for certain that she would tell Forrest he had a child if she didn’t get sick, but I think that having a child did change a lot of things in her mind and her life. She stopped running around, and I saw all that as, “Too little, too late”. She was just another person in Forrest’s life that helped to shape it, but I don’t see her as some big bad villainess.

“All of the hippies at the anti-war rally were Renaissance Fair attendees.”

Maybe some, but not all. There was a general casting call for extras in the D.C. area. I know, because I considered doing it — I was in high school at the time and looked like a hippie. I got as far as talking to a casting agent on the phone about requirements. I decided against it, because a friend of mine did some extra work in True Lies around that time, and, since they shot at night, he would come in the next day and sleep through every class. It didn’t seem worth it. (Although maybe it was, because you can see him really clearly!)

For some reason, at the time we thought it was called “Forest Gumps” and was about a time traveller. They were going to insert him into famous historical scenes using this fancy new “CG” technology.

13. There is no fucking way that Haley Joel Osment is Forrest’s actual son.

This drug-addicted manipulative slut, who has probably had unprotected sex hundreds of times, sleeps with a mentally challenged guy once, and then (after heartlessly leaving before he wakes up) has an intelligent son who looks nothing like him? They should have made him become an astronaut. That would be more believable than him fathering Forrest Jr.

Forrest Gump is my favorite movie and I am a baby boomer.It is about trust and using your soul,being to dumb to see the obstacles, and staying loyal to friends. All You Milleniums are stuck in the head thinking and not going into action. When you think you stink.

Well, baby boomers are probably the single greediest, most self-absorbed, wasteful, arrogant, manipulative, willfully ignorant, and reckless generation in the history of mankind. Your asshat of a generation has fucked up this world worse than anyone before or since. Your ilk have fucked up things quite possibly beyond repair, and yet you still fight like hell against every attempt to try and make things better. You are petulant, destructive, scared little children.

I’m not here to take issue with what you think of Forrest Gump or it’s themes. I don’t even dislike the movie myself. But you can take your sanctimonious bullshit opinions and stick them where the sun don’t shine. You don’t have the moral high ground to call out any other generation for their alleged transgressions, because at best, your generation represents the absolute low point in American history, and at worst, your generation represents the low point in HUMAN history.

How is everyone missing the best part about Forrest Gump? Jenny has AIDS, they never explicitly say whether little Forrest is AIDS-free or not. That question is answered in Walker: Texas Ranger ([www.youtube.com]). Little Forrest must have been put into protective services (because why would they leave a kid alone with a mentally handicapped person?) and later informed through the dutiful research of Walker that little Forrest has AIDS.

Slight side note: Everybody assumes Jenny has AIDS (and I can admit I was part of that group too), but they never actually say what she has, only that the doctors don’t know. But, from what I understand, in the book she dies of Hep C, so it isn’t unreasonable to assume the same for the movie.